The Last Salad
The spinach lay wilting on the counter, a reminder of the dinner she'd planned to make for him. Three days now since he'd walked out, and the greens had surrendered to gravity and time, much like her marriage.
Her phone buzzed — the iPhone lit up with his name again. She stared at the screen, thumb hovering, feeling like one of those office zombies she saw on the train every morning, moving through the motions of living without actually being alive. The division of assets, he'd called it. As if their life together could be split into neat columns, debts and credits.
The cat, Merlin, wound around her ankles, demanding dinner. He was the only one who hadn't changed. He still wanted warmth, still purred when she ran her fingers through his hair — fur, she corrected herself. Even now, she caught herself using the wrong words, the intimate language of a relationship that had existed mostly in her head for the past year.
"He's not coming back, you know," she said to Merlin. He blinked slowly, unconcerned with human heartbreak.
She thought about last Tuesday, when she'd found the gray hair at her temple and had her first real cry in months. Not about the hair itself — she was forty-two, it was inevitable — but about the way she'd rushed to the mirror, terrified of showing age to a man who hadn't really looked at her in three years. How many hours had she spent performing youth for an audience of one who'd already left the theater?
The iPhone chimed again. A text this time: Can we talk about the cat?
She laughed, a sharp and surprising sound in the empty apartment. Of course. Not "are you okay," not "I'm sorry," not even "I miss you." But the cat. Merlin, who had been his Christmas present three years ago, the practice run for the family they'd never had.
She swept the spinach into the trash, watched it fall into the darkness, and typed back: Keep the phone. I'm keeping the cat.
Merlin purred against her leg, and for the first time in a long time, something inside her felt undead, alive and waking up.